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Winner of the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry
Shortlisted The Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2021
Heartbreaking detail permeates Hardisty's deftly musical debut. These are love poems, conjuring relationships just beginning, gone astray, turned wrong, or fading from view. The reader is on tour through love's phantasy, a parade of fragments in lost rooms all set within time slips that draw us back and forth across countries and continents – and in dreams that rise and coalesce around absence. Written over a decade, these tightly-accomplished lyrics will delight those familiar with Hardisty's writing and find a wide new readership for those yet to discover this important new writer.
‘I admire not only the rhythms… but also the shrewd, touching syntactical placements… these matters of harmony and melody give the emotion its breath and its bite.’ —Robert Pinsky
‘A really beautiful and mature collection… the voice is true, smart, brave, melancholy—and original.’ —Gail Mazur
‘Displaying his considerable lyric gifts, Daniel Hardisty’s poems are steeped in a tone of authoritative maturity. Dramatizing love’s vagaries in crisp, clear, effortless-seeming verse, this wise work is exquisitely made.’ —Jacob Polley, Northern Writer’s Awards